From the Ground Up
A European perspective on design and out of the box thinking with Civil 3D.
About Jack About OveLatest Post
- posted 10/27/08 by Jack Strongitharm Navisworks Navigator in Civil 3D
- As jobs get more complicated you may find that you want a more powerful reviewing tool to look at your Civil 3D models.
I am now working with Navisworks quite a bit now and I am presenting at Civils Show 2008 at Earls Court 2 in London on how you can use Navisworks along with Civil 3D. This will be looking at clash detection and also 4D modelling.
What is 4D?
Time
So the construction sequence is critical and can make or break the project on site from when underground cables need to be diverted to when a truck load of fill material is delivered and stored on site and potentially blocking the site for vehicles etc.
So if you are interested I will be presenting each day at Civils Show on 18th, 19th and 20th of November.
There also will be my other Civil colleagues presenting different topics using Civil 3D during the day.
www.civils.com
Anyway, I wandered off the topic of this post.
If you have Navisworks installed along with Civil 3D on the same machine you can export to a NWD file but you can also enable a simpler viewing engine in Civil 3D.
By typing 'nwnavigator' will open up the panel.
Then hit the refresh button and your model in Civil 3D will load in the viewer within a couple of seconds.
Then you can fly, walk and orbit the biggest of models with no effort.
This viewer only shows shaded and wireframe mode.
If you want render materials, you will need to use the actual Navisworks software.
Then you can clash away and look at construction sequence also.
Now we are getting into what I call True BIM of 'Building the Information Model'. Its not just for Architects you know!!
We could have our own acronyms such as CIM or RIM, but maybe that is taking it too far!!
Have a good week
Jack Strongitharm
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Previous Posts
-
Editable ground profile
Posted 10/22/08 by Jack Strongitharm
Sometimes we may want to work closely to the existing ground, but not want to retrace all the existing ground profile to get a design profile.
Of course there is a little trick that you can pull off to get this desired effect.
What you can do, is draw the ground profile
Click on profile view properties and profile tab.
Then change the status to 'Static'
You know you have a Static profile, when you select it as it will display lots of grips
Then what you can do is edit the profile, with the grid panorama window, grip edit or in this case I will raise it 100mm up, just so you can see the result.
Also maybe change the name of the profile and change the style so it will look different to the original ground.
'Raise VIPs/PVIs'
You also probably want the original ground back, so just go back to 'Profile from surface' and add the existing ground surface again and click ok, not draw
Final result
Could be handy
Jack Strongitharm
-
Stage Storage - a sample
Posted 10/08/08 by Ove Cervin
Yes!
Finally, yesterday, I was able to call a person who 6 month ago called me and asked about if it was easy to calculate the volumes up to a certain level in a Pond. I then told him that this was possible, but not, at that time, fully automatic.
Now, today, all Subscription customers are able to download and use the new Stage Storage extension. This easy tool directly gives the volumes of a pond to all levels of interest. Subscription center is the place where to find it.
Below is a sample pond.
Bottom is at elevation +73m
To get the volumes we start the extension in the Toolbox.
Give it a name (optional) and then choose calculation method. There are, as you see, also other settings.
Choose the "Define Basin" button.
In my case I use the "Define basin from contours" in this dialog.
When we select a contour line on the pond/basin Surface we get a number of white Contours presented.
Then we get the report - smooooooth...
We get the areas for each contour line, the volumes between each level, incremental, of contours and the total, cumulative volume up to that level.
If you need the volumes up to, let's say, +77.25m - just change the Style for your Surface to match that interval and do the calculation here again! Eeeeeeasy... ;-)
Note: As all units are at the moment in imperial. The easiest way to get them metric is using the resulting ASCII-file and put it in to Excel.
We also get a ASCII-report that can be saved.
Go try it out!
Cheers / Ove C -
New Pipe trench Subassemblies
Posted 10/02/08 by Ove Cervin
Hi there,
This week I finally got some time working a little bit more on the new Subassemblies we provided over Subscription center recently.
As I have a number of customers in Sweden working on Pipe Networks I wanted to see how these Pipe Trench Subassemblies could be used.
This is what it looks like in the Tool Palettes
If I create two Pipe Networks, add an Alignment for each, add a existing ground profile to them, and build a Corridor - we get this. I have also added a simple Pipe from the "right" in to the Pipe Network nr 2, seen below.
What happens is that the new Subassembly finds the Pipes and adjust the width automatically to the Corridor.
Here is a sample of some Sections showing the widening.
Hope you'll find them useful.
Cheers / Ove C